Charles Darwin* Read Online Free PDF Page B

trees, coffee plants, strange new bugs, rich colors of the valleys, unfamiliar birds—he was in heaven. “It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes,” he wrote. After tasting bananas for the first time, he set about harvesting every specimen he could find, exclaiming out loud with pleasure.
    Throughout the voyage, he never lost his enthusiasm for anything new. He was like a kid in a candy store: “If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over.” He collected tiny insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mice, corals, barnacles, dried bulbs and seeds of plants, rock specimens, shells, and, of course, beetles.
    At one point, Darwin described his mind as “a perfect hurricane of delight and astonishment.” In a rock pool, he marveled at a cuttlefish changing color as it hurried for cover. He succeeded in catching another and taking it back to the ship, where it put on a show by glowing in the dark. Charles was amazed, thrilled, transported by this discovery. Only later was he told that these were typical, well-known cuttlefish talents.
    Aboard ship, he was too seasick to read much. He was only halfway through Lyell’s Principles of Geology , but he was very impressed. Lyell, like Leonardo da Vinci centuries before him, reasoned that Earth’s mountains and valleys had formed over enormously long periods of time. The Earth must be at least hundreds of millions of years old, not a few thousand as stated in the Bible. Lyell saw that “the present is the key to the past,” meaning that the same forces acting on Earth now—such as volcanoes, earthquakes, floods—have always been the cause of change on the planet. Over time lots of small events led to big changes.
    This was new news, opposed to what Darwin’s professors had taught about Cuvier and isolated catastrophic events.
    Trying to reconcile Cuvier and Lyell—they couldn’t both be right—kept Darwin’s brain busy. He happily “geologized” his way through the trip, starting in St. Jago, the site of an ancient volcano. Exploring a streak of white rock that turned out to be compacted coral and seashells, he noticed that the embedded shells were the same as the live sea creatures on the beach. So this layer must once have been a seabed, underwater. The level of the white streak varied, but there were no dramatic breaks in the white streak, so it didn’t seem to have arisen from a sudden catastrophe. The land must have risen from the ocean gradually, as the result of a long series of volcanic events over many years.
    Landing in present-day Salvador in Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the tropical forest but disgusted by slavery, banned in Britain but still legal in other countries, including the United States. Darwin’s family was strongly abolitionist, so he was shocked to find that Captain FitzRoy was pro-slavery, believing it was part of the natural order of things. Uncharacteristically, Darwin was drawn into a huge argument with him about it. Afterward FitzRoy apologized, then they never spoke of it again.
    As for his attitude toward native people he encountered over the course of the voyage, Darwin attributed differences between people to cultural advantages, to “civilization” (British, of course, being the best), not racial inferiority. Humans around the word were ultimately and “essentially the same creature,” he wrote, but their societies were at different stages of development. Today Darwin’s views seem elitist and condescending, but for the time his thinking was progressive.
    By 1832 Darwin was in the Brazilian rainforest, delighting in butterflies, parrots, and army ants. After seeing a group of vibrantly colored flatworms undulating in the shade, he started his flatworm collection, marshalling some fifteen species.
    When they were onboard ship, he and FitzRoy settled into a routine.